More split nuclei

On 16 July 1945, the United States did it. The Soviets followed suit on 29 August 1949, followed by the UK on 3 October 1952. The French followed on 13 February 1960, followed by China on 16 October 1964. On 18 May 1974, India joined the club, with Pakistan doing so on 28 May 1998. Israel and/or South Africa may have tested on 22 September 1979, in an incident detected by an American satellite.

As of 9 October 2006, North Korea seems to have tested a nuclear bomb. It makes you wonder how many more states will do so in the next fifty years, as well as what the security character of the Southeast Asian area, in particular, will be by then.

That said, while they seem to have scientists and engineers capable of making nuclear weapons, the North Koreans don’t seem to have staff capable of producing a particularly cogent English press release:

The nuclear test was conducted with indigenous wisdom and technology 100 percent. It marks a historic event as it greatly encouraged and pleased the KPA and people that have wished to have powerful self-reliant defense capability.

Since this test was pretty clearly meant for American audiences, you might have expected them to pay more attention to their wording. I suppose multi-kiloton underground blasts speak louder than press releases.

Despite such nationalist rhetoric, the test seems more likely to endanger the average North Korean than help them. In the short term, there is the danger that someone will try to strike their nuclear capability before they develop credible delivery systems. Also, as The Economistidentifies: “[T]he immediate threats from North Korea’s new capability come from radioactive leaks into the atmosphere and North Korea’s groundwater.” Finally, the test risks sparking a nuclear arms race in Asia that threatens the security of the whole region, at least.

[Update: 1:30pm] Based on my server logs, lots of people have been looking for these photos of test sites in Nevada during the last few days. Google still hasn’t figured out that this site has moved to WordPress. In any case, the photos show one of the ugly legacies of testing and reinforce the point that, while world should be moving towards nuclear disarmament, the converse seems to be taking place.

It does seem as though this could prove to be a big strategic mistake. If China, Japan, the US, and South Korea manage to coordinate policy, the North Koreans could really lose out from this – both in terms of the leadership and the people in general.

PARIS — Across the globe from Washington to Moscow to Beijing, North Korea’s underground nuclear test met with strong opposition Monday and some governments threatened to punish the secretive regime in Pyongyang with deeper isolation and possible tighter sanctions at the United Nations Security Council.

Prime Minister Taro Aso of Japan said his government will seek a new United Nations resolution to condemn the test. He said an urgent meeting of the Security Council was expected to be held on Monday in New York at Japan’s request.

China, a key player whose response was closely watched around the world, said it was “resolutely opposed” to the test, according to a Foreign Ministry statement carried by the official Xinhua news agency, Reuters reported.

Russia said the test breached a United Nations Security Council resolution and would “endanger security and stability in the region,” according to the Russian foreign ministry in a statement.

So North Korea has tested a nuclear bomb. What should President Barack Obama do about it? Ideally, nothing. A shrug may be the response that Kim Jong-il fears most.

This, after all, was only the second A-bomb that Pyongyang has ever tested. (The first was in October 2006,) And recent long-range missile test, last April, seems to have been a dud—as were both of the other such tests it’s attempted in the past decade. If the big fear is that this loathsome dictatorship might fit a nuclear warhead onto a missile with the range to hit Japan or beyond, the worry seems premature by many years.

As far as nuclear weapons go, almost everything can be learned from less-than full-scale testing except the actual yield of the untested device. Thus, this could have been a scaled-down test. It also would fit with a geological concern particular to North Korea — the water table is so high that an underground test runs a very real risk of irradiating a portion of the nation’s water supply. And, of course, the water tables of the Korean Peninsula do not split nicely along the 38th parallel. In a nation the size of Nevada — the state in which the United States has done much of its weapons testing — there will very likely be observable environmental consequences regardless of whether the test was full-scale.

Ultimately, however, the possibility of a scaled-down test is unconvincing. Environmental considerations aside, hydronuclear and hydrodynamic testing — two common forms of subcritical experimentation with weapons design — both have yields much lower than those observed Oct. 9, on the order of tens of tons and lower. These experiments test the function of the weapon without using enough fissile material to create a supercritical mass. Also, scaled-down tests with yields in the hundreds of tons often indicate boosted fission and thermonuclear devices with yields measured in megatons and of substantially greater complexity. Such complexity is almost certainly beyond North Korea’s current reach.

An American nuclear scientist says he was shown a vast new nuclear facility when he visited North Korea last week.

Dr Siegfried Hecker said he had been shown “more than 1,000 centrifuges” for enriching uranium, which can be used for making nuclear weapons.

The Stanford University scientist was stunned at how sophisticated the plant was, according to reported remarks.

When international weapons inspectors were expelled from North Korea in 2009, the plant did not exist, officials say.

Dr Hecker’s discovery was first reported in the New York Times, where he spoke of being taken to see an “ultra-modern control room”.

In subsequent remarks obtained by AP news agency, he said that unlike other North Korean facilities it “would fit into any modern American processing facility”, and spoke of more than 1,000 centrifuges “all neatly aligned and plumbed below us”.

“Monitoring for the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty had already reached such a sophisticated level by 2006, when the monitoring network was only 60 percent complete, that more than twenty CTBT seismic stations detected the first North Korean nuclear test of 9 October as far away as South America, even though the explosive yield was less than one kiloton. [The Hiroshima bomb was 13.5 kilotons.] Besides 170 seismic stations arrayed across the world, the CTBT’s monitoring system includes eleven hydroacoustic stations capable of hearing the explosion of a fifty-pound TNT test charge ten thousand miles away; sixty infrasound stations listening for low-frequency sound waves from above-ground nuclear tests; and eighty radionucleotide stations sniffing for bomb-derived radioactive particles and radioactive nobel gases. Once the CTBT is fully in force, wrote the Science magazine reporter Daniel Clery, “its executive council, if faced with a suspected test… can call on the CTBT’s ultimate verification measure: an on-site inspection. Within days of a suspected test, a team of up to 40 people can be on the scene and scouring an area of up to 1000 square kilometres using overflights, mobile radionucleotide detectors, microseismic arrays to detect aftershocks, gamma-ray detectors, ground-penetrating radar, magnetic and gravitational field mapping, and electrical conductivity measurements.””

Rhodes, Richard. The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New Dangers, and the Prospects for a World Without Nuclear Weapons. (2010) p.295 (hardcover)

SEOUL, South Korea — North Korea has repaired flood damage at its nuclear test facility and could conduct a quick atomic explosion if it chose, though water streaming out of a test tunnel may cause problems, analysis of recent satellite photos indicates.

North Korea says it has carried out a successful nuclear test, drawing widespread international condemnation. Follow the latest reaction from around the world as the UN prepares to hold an emergency meeting.